"The subway must have been the last one to run," he said. Other members of the masthead never made It to the office that day. Andrew Rosenthal cotÙdn't get across the Hudson from New Jersey; the ferry that AI Siegal, an assistant manag- ing editor, was taking from Hoboken was turned back by the Coast Guard. A few blocks from Boyd's barber- shop, Jonathan Landman, the metro- politan editor, was at a gym on 106th Street, when he looked out the window and saw his wife running toward the building. She told him of the attacks. He hurried home and started calling some of his hundred-odd reporters, directing traffic to Ground Zero. The police reporter Christopher John (C.].) Chivers was already downtown. It was primary day in the city's mayoral election, and he had been assigned to the Board of Elections headquarters. He was wearing his best suit. When his beeper went off: he ran half a mile to Ground Zero, approaching Liberty Street just as the second plane hit the south tower. As desks and concrete and steel beams plunged to the street, he dived into the entrance of a liquor store near Trinity Church, and soon began interviewing people huddled nearb)!. Chivers tried calling the metropolitan desk, but his cell phone didn't work. To escape falling debris, he moved under the Liberty Street Bridge to another build- ing, stepping in dust "that was like fine powdered snow." He had reached a building that housed a day-care center, where children were fretting over the whereabouts of their parents, when he heard a "high -pitched, twIsting, grinding, metallic screeching" that "sounded like an enormous train collision" and felt like an earthquake. The south tower had col- lapsed. He found a telephone and called Landman, who told him, "I don't really know what to tell you to do, but you have good judgment, so follow it." Chivers spent the next twenty-four hours at Ground Zero, feeding information to Times reporters in the newsroom. Gerald Boyd was in the newsroom. "The dimensions kept growing," he re- called. "We heard Congress had closed and the airlines were shut down. We dis- cussed what wotÙd happen if the New York Times were attacked. Could we put out a paper?" John Geddes, the deputy managing editor, who was at his desk when the first plane crashed into the Trade Center, said, "This was a story we had been training all our lives for." Raines, who is unembarrassed by such comparisons, likened his role to that of Ulysses S. Grant: before attacking the biggest story of his career, he wotÙd con- centrate his forces. All day; Raines and Boyd moved back and forth from their neighboring offices, sometimes minis- tering to distraught staff members. Sometimes they comforted themselves. They were not, of course, mere wit- nesses. Their families, their friends, their city were jeopardized. "The toughest thing for me was in a personal sense," Boyd said. "I had dropped my son at school and cotÙdn't reach my wife and son until 5 P.M." Late in the afternoon, Krystyna Stachowiak left her midtown office, and made her way to the Times, where she greeted Raines with a hug. For its September 12th edition, the Times deployed some three hundred re- porters, thirty staff photographers, and two dozen freelance photographers. Eighty-two thousand five hundred words were devoted to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon; there were seventy-four bylines accompanying sixty-seven stories, filling thirty-three pages of a ninety-six-page paper. Nearly 1.7 million copies were printed, almost half a million more than normal. At the top of the front page, which is now framed on Raines's wall, was a head- line-"u.S. ATTACKED"-set in ninety- six-point type, a size used otÙy twice be- fore: to announce Neil Armstrong's walk on the moon, in 1969, and the resigna- tion of President Nixon, in 1974. In the center of the page were four color photo- graphs, showing the Twin Towers ablaze and the destruction at Ground Zero. Running down either side of page 1 were four stories, not the usual seven. In a Sep- tember 12th e-mail to the newsroom, Raines wrote, "Thank you one and all for a magnificent effort in putting out, in the midst of a heartbreaking day, a paper of which we can be proud for years to come. . . . In a different context of vi- 01ence, Yeats wrote that 'a terrible beauty . b ,,, IS orne L ong before September 11th, Raines had gIven much thought to ways of conveYIng a sense of command. He says that he learned the importance of this from his father, who never finished high school but built a store-fixture business in Birmingham which evenmally made him a millionaire. He often told col- leagues the story of one summer after he graduated from Birmingham-Southern College and had gone to work for his fa- ther, who warned him that sooner or later an employee wotÙd challenge him, and told him that, when he did, "you've got to win that fight." Now, in Septem- ber of 2001, Raines wanted to challenge his editors, to get into the fray before as- signments were made. Raines became what the assistant managing editor Michael Oreskes re- ferred to as "the reader-in-chie " meeting constantly with the assistant managing editors. To better penetrate the Pentagon and the national-security agencies, he brought the defense-and-intelligence ex- pert Michael Gordon back from Lon- don. He asked Patrick Tyler, a trusted friend, to return from Mosco where he was bureau chie to write "lead-alls"- stories meant to bring together the dif- ferent strands of a news event, like the stories that Johnny Apple had written during the Gulf War. Each move caused hurt feelings and aroused some oppo- sition. So, too, did Raines's insistence on working directly through the mast- head editors rather than through the de- partment editors, as Lelyveld had done. Raines wanted his assistant managing editors to demand more of the depart- ment heads. "How come something we discussed at the page-one meeting didn't get in the paper today?" he wotÙd ask, according to Soma Golden Behr, an as- sistant managing editor. He started ask- ing for stories that offered "all known thought" on a subject-what was known about Osama bin Laden's finances, or about anthrax. "Hunt big game, not rab- bits," he wotÙd sa)!. He was impatient with complaint, and in truth there was little time for it. One complaint he would not abide was that he didn't respect borders be- tween departments-that he shotÙdn't parachute in his "star" writers to cover stories. Criticism that he favored stars had attached itself to Raines when he ran the Washington bureau, and it was a criticism, StÙzberger told those he con- fided in, that would have blocked Raines's promotion if StÙzberger was not con- vinced that he had changed. Raines, THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 10, 2002 51